Natural Stone Floor Tiles Give Your Kitchen a Great Finish

Ask any realtor and they will tell you that the most important room in a home is the kitchen. You simply must get this one room right or so much of what you may have invested in the rest of your home simply won’t deliver 100% when it’s appraised.

So now the hottest trend in kitchen design and decorating, is natural materials, and looks. Soft earth tone colours on the walls, finished hardwood cabinets, and yes natural stone floor tiles to complete the look. Just think how much square footage your kitchen floor occupies.

So then aren’t there faux or cultured stone floor tiles now that are quite a bit cheaper to buy? The answer to that is yes and in fact huge advancements have been made in duplicating the look of polished granite in particular.

The truth is told though, as hard as product engineers and developers have worked over the years, they just haven’t been able to come up with a fake stone product that is 100% indistinguishable from the real McCoy. Some come awful close, but in the end, none look completely real.

Now one of the more popular choices today in natural stone floor tiles is polished granite, and this is for a couple of good reasons. The first reason is that granite with its metal flecks interspersed in white, gray, and black translucent cottage cheese texture looks simply amazing.

Then granite is hard. Real hard! In fact the darker the granite is, the harder it is, with black granite being the hardest of them all. It’s the high iron content that makes it so dark and the hardness of the iron is also why polished black granite will also be the most expensive of the granite floor tiles.

Hard granite costs more to quarry, cut and polish. Don’t get the impression though that softer stones like lighter granite or any of the other more exotic stones that are being made into floor tiles today wear quickly because they aren’t as hard as black granite.

It’s simply not the case, and besides the nice thing about some of the softer natural stone floor tiles is that should they get a scratch, it’s more easily polished out. Also some of the softer natural stone tiles come with amazing colours, and incredible designs in them.

Travertine tiles are a great case in point. Because they are a type of limestone, they come in several variations of soft earth-tone colours ranging from white, to tan, and even a light brown. Also because the stone is not as rare or hard to work as so many others, these tiles are also some of the more affordable to buy.

Even so, just because they’re less costly doesn’t mean that they don’t feature interesting designs, because they do. You see travertine as formed by rapidly forming lime deposits around hot springs, and ancient caves. Stalagmites and stalactites in caves are made out of travertine.